"is this active principle which keeps me still awake? Why fly my
thoughts abroad, when everything around me appears at home?" My
child was sleeping with equal calmness--innocent and sweet as the
closing flowers. Some recollections, attached to the idea of home,
mingled with reflections respecting the state of society I had been
contemplating that evening, made a tear drop on the rosy cheek I had
just kissed, and emotions that trembled on the brink of ecstasy and
agony gave a poignancy to my sensations which made me feel more
alive than usual.

What are these imperious sympathies? How frequently has melancholy
and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has
disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind. I have then
considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of
mankind; I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion,
like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a
part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself--not,
perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping
the thread of an existence, which loses its charms in proportion as
the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the
heart. Futurity, what hast thou not to give to those who know that
there is such a thing as happiness! I speak not of philosophical
contentment, though pain has afforded them the strongest conviction
of it.

After our coffee and milk--for the mistress of the house had been
roused long before us by her hospitality--my baggage was taken
forward in a boat by my host, because the car could not safely have
been brought to the house.